Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Case Report

Decreased Survival in African Patients with Triple Negative Breast Cancer

Marta Honório¹, Nuno Guerra-Pereira², Júlia Silva³, Janice Alves³, Ana Filipa³ and Sofia Braga^1*

¹Hospital Prof. Doutor Fernando Fonseca, José de Mello Saúde, Portugal

²Hospital Nossa Senhora do Rosário, Portugal

³University of Algarve, Portugal

*Corresponding Author:

Sofia Braga, MD, PhD
Hospital Prof. Doutor Fernando Fonseca, José de Mello Saúde, Portugal
Tel: +351966722731
E-mail: sofia.braga@jmellosaude.pt

Received date: May 25, 2016; Accepted date: June 25, 2016; Published date: June 29, 2016

Citation: Honório M, Guerra-Pereira N, Silva J, Alves J, Filipa A, et al. (2016) Decreased Survival in African Patients with Triple Negative Breast Cancer. J Palliat Care Med 6:270. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000270

Copyright: © 2016 Honorio M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction: Triple Negative Breast Carcinomas (TNBC) are more prevalent in younger women especially those with African Ancestry, in whom the disease appears to be more aggressive. Since there are no data on Africans living in continental Europe, we sought to analyse a sample of African women from a European country and determine if, like African Americans, they have more aggressive tumor biology and poorer outcomes.

Methods: We performed a retrospective review of TNBC to compare clinical and pathological features and survival between African and non-African patients. All women presented with breast cancer (BC), between 2005 and 2014, to a single general hospital, in Portugal.

Results: A total of 144 (9.3% of the whole sample) TNBC patients were identified and amongst these, 17 were African (12%). African patients were not significantly younger than non-African patients (median age of 60 years vs 57.2 years, respectively, p=0.59). Regarding tumor size, nodal status and histologic grade at presentation, these variables were very similar between the two cohorts. Nevertheless, the prevalence of initially metastatic BC was significantly higher among the African population (41.2% vs 11%, p<0,005) and the outcome was worse for these patients (median survival: 62 vs 15 months, p<0.005).

Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that African patients more frequently presented with late stage disease and worse survival outcome than the non-African population. These findings may be explained by more aggressive tumor biology.

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